Your Financial Advice Isn't About Your Technology. It's About You.
By H. Adam Holt, CEO & Founder of Asset-Map
Picture this: You’ve been a financial professional for a decade. Suddenly, all your technology stops working.
Your smartphone won’t connect to the internet, your laptop stops powering up, your calculator inputs don’t register. Nothing you have is operational except a pen and a pad of paper.
In this hypothetical scenario, would you still be able to provide timely financial advice? Could you still provide the same quality of advice as you do when all of your technology is working?
My hope is that most financial professionals would say that yes, they can provide the same advice. In fact, if you’ve been in the financial industry for any length of time at all, you likely remember a time when technology was much less reliable than it is today.
Your ability to serve your clients shouldn’t solely revolve around the technology applications you choose. Your advice should be rooted in your ability to connect on a human, personal level.
Financial Planning isn’t a Technology Platform
A decade ago, technology went down all the time.
It could be a screen sharing app that would, for some unknown reason, decide to stop working at precisely the wrong time. It could be a client who couldn’t figure out how to log into your remote sharing system.
It might fluster you in the moment, but providing sound financial advice isn’t about being able to share your screen from a hundred miles away. It’s based on asking good questions, listening, and understanding how the financial system works.
Financial planning is not an app; it is adding confidence to your clients’ financial decisions by communicating, educating, and elevating their current condition from the place that you found it.
Whether you’ve been a financial professional for a few years or a couple of decades, what matters is that the bedrock of financial advice is a consultative approach that adds the human value of communication to a person’s financial situation.
The Role Technology Plays in Financial Advice
Now, this isn’t to say that technology plays no role in financial advice; that would be a mistake to try to argue that point. Technology has, over the years, enabled financial professionals to do more with less. They can be more efficient, communicate more complex information without increasing the complexity of the conversation, and exchange information faster.
Technology innovation has revolutionized work outside of the client relationship, too. It has given us the ability to look at real-time pricing, execute trading decisions immediately with straight-through processing, eliminate paper documents, and give us to-the-second information updates.
Technology allows us to stay on top of our obligations, calendars, and to-do lists like never before. Best of all, it’s given us the ability to automate much of the busy work that used to take up so much of the day.
Some tools have even given us the ability to automate outreach on an ongoing basis so financial professionals can get in front of clients and prospects more often, without putting more time into the effort.
But even though technology can automate some parts of client communication, there’s one thing it will never be able to do: Fully replace the advice given by a human advisor.
Why Technology Will Never Replace Human Advice
I believe that technology replacing human advice will be a very difficult, probably impossible, process.
Think about our hypothetical scenario at the start of this article. If you take all the technology away from your client relationships, you can still deliver the most value by simply communicating the differences between where your client is at now versus where they ideally want to get to in the future.
The plan isn’t the focus of this relationship; it’s the confidence and the human connection you provide as part of your communication.
In fact, in most cases planning is so far off (sometimes 30 or 40 years) it almost begs the question of how relevant long-term planning can really be. There are so many changes that happen in the course of long periods of time, that the projections and predictions made a decade or two ago often end up being almost useless.
If you eliminate the need to prognosticate the future and model what’s going to happen 40 years from now, what are you left with? You are left with helping people understand what they’re currently doing and whether or not it makes sense for their mission and purpose in their lives.
For many years, I’ve made a simple case: It doesn’t matter what’s happened in the past, and you can’t control what happens in the future.
All we can ever do is decide what to do with today.
You can put this mindset into practice with your clients immediately by asking them one simple question. It doesn’t matter if you’re an investment banker, insurance agent, legal or tax advisor, or a financial advisor.
Ask your clients this: “Is what you are doing today in your best interest?”
That simple question reveals all you need to know about if a person’s situation is giving them the ability to focus on what’s most important to them.
If they don’t feel like it does, then it’s time to help them focus on what they should be doing instead.
The Asset-Map, in many ways, is a literal representation of all the decisions a person has made and is currently making in their financial life. It lays it all out there on one page so they can easily take a look at it and understand if their financial decisions are allowing them to pursue what’s most important to them.
Now, once you understand if your client feels like they are living with intention or not, it’s time to use your intelligence to help them move even further forward (not your artificial intelligence—your human advisor intelligence).
By communicating in a way that they’ll appreciate, you won’t need any technology to help them live a life that gives them happiness now, and confidence for where they’re heading in the future.